The Quantum Shift in Biomedical Discovery

Smart Talks with IBM - Pushkin Industries and iHeartPodcasts

Dr. Laura Jay-Hi discusses how Cleveland Clinic and IBM's Discovery Accelerator are using AI and quantum computing to revolutionize biomedical research, particularly in epilepsy treatment and drug development. She highli

Key takeaways

• Quantum computing enables simulation of complex biological systems beyond AI's reach

Transcript preview

This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human. I'm Malcolm Globwell and you're listening to Smart Talks with IBM. When Dr Laura Jay-Hi began treating epilepsy patients in the early 2000s, she noticed something unsettling. Different surgeons could look at the exact same case and recommend completely different treatments. One surgeon might remove one part of the brain, another a different part, and and a third might not operate at all. Dr. Jay-Hi believed there had to be a better way, one grounded in data. That conviction set her on a path that would lead her to become chief research information officer at Cleveland Clinic, and the executive program lead for the Discovery Acceler. The Discovery Accelerator is a 10-year partnership between Cleveland Clinic and IBM, where researchers are using AI and quantum computing to make incredible discoveries. in health care and life sciences. I sat down with Dr. Jayhite to explore what's happening now, what's possible with quantum computing, and where this next era of biomedical discovery is headed. Epilepsy was your kind of specialty within neurology. Correct, yes. What led you to that? I was always fascinated by the brain, you know, it's the part of our body that leaves still to this day the most to be discovered. was always intrigued by areas that leave more for discovery. And epilepsy was my pragmatic side wanting to choose a subspecialty where the problem can be fixed. In epilepsy, there are many medications that are very effective and there's a brain surgery that we can do to stop seizures when medicines don't work. That attracted me, compared to other areas in neurology, like stroke. for example or dementia where usually the damage is more definite. I wanted to be able to tell my patients that you have a big problem but here's what I can do to fix it and epilepsy offered me that. But what would it must have been interesting and intriguing unsolved problems in neurology? Oh my gosh it's the whole brain isn't it? Before starting to deal with artificial intelligence and research and research in research, in the neurology I'm dealing with real intelligence the human brain and how it works and how we think and how we make decisions and how it can grow and evolve and so there is many untapped questions in the neurology and that's part of the fascination in it. In epilepsy in her brain. It's actually one of the conditions in a neurology that's a perfect alignment of all of the scientific disciplines. It's biology and physics and chemistry all working together to make us who we truly are, right? So every other discipline, if you think of computing, for example, it's purely electricity or if we do... drug development or drug discovery, that's mostly chemistry, experiments in the lab, that's mostly biology. But the human brain is all of those put together. The cells in our brain secrete these chemical substances that diffuse everywhere and hook up where they need to, to trigger certain circuits and then trigger some effects afterwards. So it was just an elegant science. that has big impact. We're shortly going to get there and talk about you've taken on this kind of very technology focused role of Cleveland Clinic. I'm curious about if I go if we go back to when you were just starting out at Cleveland Clinic. Yeah. How much were you thinking about this sort of technology piece about what technology could do for your specialty about was that on your mind or is this something you could have come to more recently? Well, it's been a journey, right? When I started training as a clinician, my priority was just to learn how to better care for my patients and how to be a better physician, right? And then I realized that clinical practice provides an immediate reward, right? I'm interacting with a human being and helping them in the moment. So there is that immediate reward that comes with that, but that wasn't enough. I'm interacting. I'm interacting with a human being and helping them in the moment. So there is that immediate reward that wanted something more. So then I learned biomedical research practices and research offered me this path towards a future. You know the reward there is more long term. I'm studying discovering things that could help many people in the future even though I will never get to see them or meet them or have that immediate satisfaction. So that shifted me from being a pure clinician to being a clinician to being a clinician scientist. And as that journey progressed, it became very clear as medicine evolved over the past 20 years that we cannot do any good biomedical research without understanding data and technology. You know, the balance is shifting from most of the research is happening, we call it, you know, on the wet bench with actual experiments, physical experiments to a place where most of the work is happening through... compute and simulations and data. So I became much more involved for my personal research in building big data models and learning about AI and you know learning about technology in general. And then as that journey progressed, I was fortunate enough to be in a role for Cleveland Clinic where my job is to bring that technology and bridge it to research for all researchers across all researchers across. our health care system. When you were talking about how in your own research you were moving in that direction, what was your own research focused on? What were you looking at? I was looking at brain surgery for epilepsy. It's an intervention that's been around for decades actually, but when I started practice I was shocked by, you know, the practice that we had were making decisions around surgery, like you know what patient should get it versus not how likely is it to work what part of the brain should we remove all of those decisions were at the time in the early 2000s driven by clinical opinions right you know you have an experienced surgeon they decide to do this somebody else might decide to do something completely different and I didn't feel that that was the right way to practice medicine you know that we needed to be more evidence based and they data driven. So I went in the business and research of building models, predictive models that can ingest data from all of the tests that we would do about on these patients to figure out surgery. So I learned how to analyze all types of data from genetic data and individuals to pictures to electrical recordings and then combine those. into these prediction models. So basically you're looking at you're taking large numbers of surgeries for epilepsy and you're seeing what kind of connection there is between the success of the surgical intervention and the underlying presentation of the patient. Exactly. So I would be telling the patient what is your specific chance of becoming seizure free with surgery instead of giving them statistics about you know like you know in general how well is that going to be effective. So that piece of individualizing medicine. So Cleveland Clinic decides to create a post called Chief Information Officer. Chief Research Information. Chief Research Information. We have... Yes, Chief Information. Yes, so I do for research. This is parenthetically a huge job. Yes. So you apply for this. Do you know that you're going to be thinking and... talking and dealing with quantum. I started in January 2020 and like every leader who's put in a position, you know everybody tells you you should read that the first 90 days book, right, about what, how to plan. So I was reading that and doing my listening tours to understand and then COVID hits and I got a call from our executive suite about, about, called COVID that's coming. We will start testing people in four days. People will want to do research with COVID, make it happen. So it was, there's no chapter in the book about that, you know. So I, so then it really, it was like a pressure cooker, you know, test with, yeah, I have to create this access to data, structured, you know, so that we can learn from it as quickly as possible. And so that was a catalyst. So then comes 2021, that was the year of our centennial, a hundred years for Cleveland Clinic. So everybody, not just me, we were in a mindset where we were thinking long, long term, you know, like what made us special up until now, how do we stay relevant. Where is the world going to be 10 years from now? get going right this moment to shape that and be ready for it and that's when quantum came in my mind where unless we invest in it now 2021 we will not be ready for this next computer revolution that's coming after AI. Everybody in the